Help! I’m Growing Too Fast!

Help! I’m Growing Too Fast!

By Françoise Tourniaire, Founder and Owner of FT Works and Member of the ASP Executive Advisory Board

It’s really hard to scale support when the customer base is growing fast. (It is a wonderful problem to have, but it’s still a problem!)

Strategize. A steep growth curve allows and require process tuning, not just hiring more people to do more of the same.

Grow support leadership. Current leaders may not have the experience and skills to take the team to the next level. Re-evaluate if you need to hire more experienced managers and executives.

Segment customers. If you are starting from a small base, chances are that you are treating all customers the same way. With a larger base, review opportunities to provide differentiated levels of service,

Invest in self-service.It’s very difficult to hire and train enough support engineers if growth exceeds 100% per year. Self-service, on the other hand, can be scaled to any level. Write good articles and provide a great website. (We can help.)

Tool up. You will likely need new tools, better tools, and more integrated tools to handle a larger and more complex set of issues. Invest in tooling.

Use pods and mentors. Inexperienced team members require additional help as they start to work with customers. By creating pods with one mentor and 6-10 new hires, you can quickly ramp up without risking customer issues.

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At Cisco we've entered ASP's "Top Ten" for years for both the reality check and the visability

Chris Vejan, Digital Support Comres Lead

The Association of Support Professionals Top 10 Support Sites Award is immensely valuable for Jive. Not only does it provide recognition for our online support solution, it also gives reliable insight and feed back from industry experts that we implement to be even better the following year.

Kevin Williams, Jive Software

The Association of Support Professionals Top 10 Support Web Sites was a great process for our team to work through. Along with being a great opportunity to showcase the work of the many teams that contribute to our online support experience, the submission process itself helped in along some very well defined dimensions, where we stood among our peers. The breakdown of feedback across those dimensions then helped us identify and prioritize improvements that would most benefit our customers. I highly recommend the submission process as a means to help your top opportunities and feed your overall roadmap.

Matt Phillips, Symantec

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The Red Hat Customer Portal being named one of the 10 Best Web Support Sites for six years in a row is a humbling experience, and feedback we receive from the judges each year shows there is always room for further improvement. These insights from judges assist us in planning our development and strategy to better engage our customers and stay competitive in the industry year after year.